Travels and Bicycles....

So as I said yesterday, I've been traveling a bit, both for personal and work reasons.  The whole thing started out with a trip to Portland that has become a bit of a tradition.  It's focused around a week long holiday ale festival that happens in the center of downtown.  With no camera I don't have good pictures....but imagine an entire city block covered in clear roofed tents (two story tents with an actual second floor) with a giant (60 ft?) Christmas tree in the middle and about 100 beers on tap.  Yeah.....that's Christmas!

We also spend a considerable amount of time hitting up some of the 70+ breweries in Portland and checking out some of the great food they have.  In the wanderings this year I came across this:

Now if that's not pride in your bicycle culture I don't know what is!  I guess we still have a ways to go here in Reno.

This one is a terrible cell phone picture of a bicycle specific signal that tells right turning cars in a busy intersection they have to yield to bicycles!  Specific light up signals for bicyclists protection!  Only in Portland!

Ok....so that was the theme for Portland.  After being home for about 36 hours I then headed off to Spokane for a work trip.  Actually, I was a booth lacky at a conference, running a bunch of demonstrations on some of the software we use here at work.  Not to strenuous, just long hours and boring.

The main highlight for me was meeting a guy named Tom.  The interest should be obvious even in the blurry picture.  Many a hipster dreams of a beard like this.

Tom didn't fit the hipster profile (shocking).  Although being in the mining industry he did profess a fondness for blowing stuff up (which seems hipster-ish).  The whole time I talked with him however, I was picturing the aerodynamic effects that mustache would have while riding!  In Tom's case this riding would probably be a horse, but hey....I did say I was bored most of the time.

 Conferences like this don't allow you outside much, so I didn't get to really explore Spokane.  Bicycles are pretty prominent and there are signs of it everywhere.....like this:

So all in all that's why things have been quiet on the posting.  I'm done with travel for a while so I'll try to keep things a bit more up to date.